Interactive voice response (IVR) systems that provide information and channel calls to service agents in response to the spoken words or touch tone signaling of a telephone caller have been deployed for more than a decade. The traditional call center for handling service calls was based on a private branch exchange (PBX) that included core automatic call distributor (ACD) functions for connecting a caller to one of a plurality of agents. During the 1990s, the advent of the Internet, electronic commerce, and computer telephony integration (CTI) transformed the call center in ways that enabled delivery of caller data to agents, thereby enabling agents to become more efficient and to improve customer service levels. Today, many enterprises use multiple call or contact centers (both terms are used synonymously and interchangeably in the present application) that extend across different geographic regions, with communications taking place through public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) and Internet protocol (IP) enabled networks that support multi-channel (voice, e-mail, text chat, and Web collaboration) customer interaction.
By way of example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,798,877 teaches a system in which a caller utilizes a personal computer (PC) for establishing an Internet connection to an ACD and for permitting a caller to select a particular agent. A system for providing information about a telephone caller to a telephone agent, wherein caller-specific data of the caller is used to generate a web page that displays the identified information to the agent is taught in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,871,212, 6,847,715 discloses a system for operatively integrating an ACD and an IVR unit in which an interaction input from a caller is stored and then transmitted to an appropriate agent workstation. A method and apparatus for analyzing the performance of an IVR system with respect to routing of calls or contacts received in accordance with a contact flow model is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,879,685.
It is known that callers or users prefer a rate of speaking that is adapted to their own speaking speed. For example, a research paper entitled, “Automatic user-adaptive speaking rate selection for information delivery” (published at http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/papers/icslp02-wn.pdf) proposes that IVR systems adapt the speaking rate of their text-to-speech (TTS) engines in order to maximize the user experience. There are a number of known techniques for computing the rate of speech in a conversation. For instance, one method uses phoneme-levels, while another method estimates the rate of speech directly from the waveform and acoustic features of the input utterance. Both methods are described in a paper entitled, “Rate of speech modeling for large vocabulary conversational speech recognition” (available at http://www.speech.sri.com).
As is the case with normal conversational speech, call center agents usually rely on the caller to explicitly notify him when his rate of speech is a problem; that is, to either slow down or speed up his talking speed. Often times, the agent must interpret and respond to clues given to him by the caller, such as when the caller shows impatience, annoyance, or simply asks him to repeat what he just said. In many cases, however, the caller is simply too shy or too reserved to ask the agent to change his rate of speech, leaving the caller disappointed with the interaction.
A few systems have been developed to analyze spoken dialog between a human and a machine. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,859,776 teaches a method and apparatus for facilitating interaction between a human user and a processing system that includes a voice activated browser. Information associated with the user is received at the processing system, and the information is then used to optimize a spoken dialog between the user and the processing system. Likewise, U.S. Pat. No. 6,697,457 teaches a system for managing voice messages based on emotion characteristics of the voice messages. Neither of these systems, however, addresses the problem of optimizing a call center agent's rate of speech when talking with a particular caller.
Therefore, what is needed is an automated system and method capable of guiding a call center agent associated with an ACD application to adjust his or her speaking rate to a particular caller in order to provide a more pleasant and satisfying user experience.